Superstorm Sandy has divided Manhattan between the relatively unscathed and
those severely inconvenienced

A little over a week ago, Sandy was the heroine of a Seventies film – a prematurely aged high-school blonde who finally understood that with a pair of Spandex leggings comes the accomplishment of all life’s hopes and desires.

Now Sandy will forever be remembered as the most devastating storm ever to hit New York, claiming the lives of more than 100 people across 10 states and causing $50 billion worth of damage. It has also, apparently, thrown Manhattan into civil war.

According to the media website Gawker, whereas the badly hit residents of Downtown, still “operating on pure rage at days of blackouts and meagre restaurant offerings”, lead a precarious life, sheltered Uptowners such as myself – who were able to tweet our way through Sandy while watching re-runs of The Voice – are “fat, happy and complacent”.

They have a point. Outside my apartment block, a woman is on her iPhone, demanding to know when her Pilates class will be resumed (“It’s been a week now”). In my local deli, a man in red corduroy trousers testily wonders why there’s still no Manchego. Top of Uptowners’ “First World” complaints are how to lose what’s already being termed “the Sandy weight” (when you’re under 48-hour house arrest, eating is one of the two things you can do to assuage the boredom), and what – if it’s a boy – to call the “Sandy baby” born 39 weeks from now (the second thing).

Given that my husband was stuck at the office, and a lamentable lack of foresight on the grocery front had me eating my 11-month-old’s dehydrated baby food, I don’t share either of these concerns. But when I talk to Downtown friends whose possessions had to be hastily packed into a waterproof “go bag” before they were evacuated from their homes, I do feel guilty.

Still, whether Manhattan’s post-Sandy civil war will endure beyond today’s election is doubtful. By tomorrow, the predominantly Obama-supporting city will be united – either in jubilation, or in further grief.

ZIP IT LIKE BECKHAM

David Beckham says there’s “no truth” to rumours that he’s been offered a multi-million-dollar US-based talk show by Time Warner Cable. That’s a relief. Asking the LA Galaxy star to host his own talk show is like asking Nicholas Soames to make a fitness DVD or the Duke of Edinburgh to give a seminar on multi-culturalism.

The idea of Becks being given “free rein” to discuss a variety of different sports and “talk tactics” is optimistic – if not downright laughable. Every time the LA Galaxy player speaks in public, you can hear the tinkle of a million teenage hearts shattering, which is why he sticks to the Kate Moss rule about silence being golden (her embarrassing interview in this month’s Vanity Fair aside).

Beckham must know that his brand relies on keeping it zipped (his mouth, I mean, as opposed to his trousers). Let’s hope TV executives do too.

LUVVIES TO STAY PUT

A US cartoon once suggested that the best solution to Canadians’ intolerable moral superiority would be to carpet-bomb the country with illiterate American children. That seemed a bit inhumane. But today Canada will discover whether it faces a far worse fate: the likes of Cher and Susan Sarandon – who have both cited it as a potential escape route should Romney win – taking up residence.

Of course, if there’s one thing we know about luvvies, it’s that they’re all about empty threats. Back in Britain, Sir Michael Caine and Paul Daniels were hoisted by their own petards in 1997 after promising to leave if Labour got in. Ahead of George Bush’s first election victory, Alec Baldwin similarly pledged to quit the US if the Republicans took the White House. Afterwards, he kept being greeted with the same question: “Why are you still here?”